Index to poems

Robert Stephen Hawker was born on Dec. 3, 1803, to Jacob Stephen Hawker and Jane Elizabeth Drewitt. He was educated at Liskeard and Cheltenham Grammar Schools, and Pembroke College and Magdalen College, Oxford, receiving his B.A. in 1828. Hawker brought out his first book of poems, Tendrils, in 1821, and won the Newdigate Prize at Oxford for a poem on Pompeii in 1827. After being ordained a priest in the Anglican Church in 1831, Hawker settled down in the vicarage at Morwenstow, Cornwall, in 1837, with his wife, Charlotte Eliza Rawleigh I'ans, whom he had married on Nov. 6, 1823. Other books of verse came out in 1832, 1840, 1843, and 1844, but only when Charles Dickens acknowledged his authorship of "The Song of the Western Men" on Nov. 20, 1852, in Household Words, did Hawker become well known as a poet. After Charlotte died on Feb. 2, 1863, Hawker published The Quest of the Sangraal (1864) and remarried, to Pauline Anne Kuczynski, on Dec. 21 that year. His Cornish Ballads was published in 1869. Hawkins converted to Roman Catholicism before his death at 9 Lockyer St., Plymouth, on August 15, 1875. He was survived by his wife and three daughters. The photograph of Robert Stephen Hawker, at 61, taken by Dr. Richard Budd at Barnstaple in 1864, appears in C. E. Byles' The Life and Letters of R. S. Hawker (1906), opp. p. 482. See Robert Stephen Hawker: His life and writings, the authoritative online resource, edited by Angela Williams.